Metro-North Repairs Greenwich Switch-Control House Earlier Than Expected

Railroad signal equipment at a train signal house in Cos Cob has been repaired four months ahead of schedule, Metro-North announced.

Signals from the small building control the switching of trains from one track to another along a nine-mile stretch between Port Chester, NY., and Stamford, CT. Until equipment damaged in a May 10 fire was replaced, a Metro-North employee had to switch trains manually.

Here’s the announcement from Metro-North:

Metro-North forces have successfully rebuilt a control house that was destroyed by a fire back on May 10. This critical piece of equipment controls switches and signals near Greenwich on the New Haven Line. The successful changeover to the rebuilt control house took place over the weekend of Sept. 6 & 7, which is approximately four months ahead of the original recovery schedule.

Now fully operational, the control house at Greenwich allows trains to switch between all four tracks in the area. During peak periods, trains normally use three of the New Haven Line’s four tracks to travel in the peak direction.

Immediately following the fire, Metro-North advanced the following course of action to replace the damaged control house:


Immediate Plan

Initial repairs allowed for trains to operate through this area at normal speed , but they did not provide full functionality by allowing diverging train movements.

As a result of the fire, peak-direction trains were limited to two of the four tracks in the nine-mile stretch between Stamford, CT and Port Chester, NY resulting in a bottleneck that created congestion-related delays through that area.

The highly complex process to restore limited switching capability at Greenwich progressed with an emergency locally-controlled manual panel being installed in late May.

This panel allowed for a signal maintainer to be stationed at the site at all times to work with a Rail Traffic Controller before the peak periods to manually change the direction of trains. This enabled Metro-North to make three of the four tracks available for AM Peak (inbound) trains and PM Peak (outbound) trains, which eased train congestion caused by the control house fire.

However, there remained a limited ability to switch trains from one track to another to get around operational problems if any arose in this area. The switching work is normally performed by a Rail Traffic Controller in the railroad’s Operations Control Center in NYC.

In order to switch trains from one track to another due to an operational problem to reduce train delays, we had to perform this work manually out in the field, a process that could take up to twenty minutes to effect.

Long Term Plan

The initial long-term strategy for rebuilding the damaged control house was to utilize equipment from a retired interlocking. This expedited solution would have allowed us to return the control house functionality by year’s end, a vast improvement over the typical replacement time for a new control house of 18 months.

(The standard process requires design, fabrication, installation, and testing before it can be installed and made fully operational.)

Exploring further, we found that newer equipment, which was slated for installation at another interlocking would be usable at the Greenwich location. The parameters were ideal to do this—the newer equipment uses a touchscreen (software-driven) Local Control Panel, which requires far less wiring than older versions, and the physical interlocking layouts were virtually identical.

This timesaving repair answer developed by an in-house team of Metro-North experts has allowed us the opportunity to restore full regular service to our New Haven Line customers many months earlier than any traditional repair method.

Photo credit: Metro-North